The Frost is On the Newly Purchased Pumpkin

Pumpkins are gold-plated this fall, having to do with the wet summer, I hear. Anyway, a nice big one set us back $10.00 at the supermarket. Walmart didn't even get them.

I made Paula's (food network) Mexican style chicken turnovers, and being cheap really paid off. Instead of using the store-bought pie crust ($3.49), I decided to make my own. Browsing thru recipes, in Elena's Mexican Cookery, she recommended putting chili powder in the crust. Yowsa! Did that even rock!

I made more or less Paula's filling except for adding half a chopped plum tomato, and substituting Adobo spice for cummin. I also used pepper jack cheese which gave it extra kick. Didn't remove ALL the seeds from the jalapeno. Yum, yum, yum. We baked, rather than deep-fried, and they were so good, served with salsa.

My pie crust recipe is from a food processor cookbook (Abby Mandel's) and the pie crust almost comes out to be amazingly good and it takes all of 5 minutes from measuring to fridge to chill. Rolls out like a dream. Man, I remember times I had to heave the whole mess in the garbage and start over, but this never fails.

Frost forecast tonight. I dug up my geraniums and put them in smaller pots (they spent the summer outside in a whiskey barrell) and brought inside. Big messy job, but won't I be happy come may when they can be moved back outside and I don't have to go out and buy 10 new geraniums. In this economy, one can take frugal measures.

Feeling smug because I saved $40.00 at the grocery this week and wrote some more of my book, did the estimated taxes and so on. Doing the estimate was not as hard as I had feared. There's something about those IRS forms that intimidates. Yup. I sucked it up and actually did it, and didn't take all day either.

So. . . off to watch the Red Sox game. Wore my shirt today for good luck. Being part of Red Sox Nation is not for the faint of heart. Onward.

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In Honor of St. Valentine

I changed my last snarky post. Instead. . . AOL crashed when I submitted my post, and in spite of what blogger promises, it never saves a draft automatically, ever, so you lose everything. Happy Valentine's Day to AOL and Blogger! What a pair. Love and kisses. Sometimes I write the post in Word and once Word crashed and I lost the post.Happy Valentine's Day to all Microsoft products. Love and kisses to all.
Doing your taxes sucks, big time. Love and kisses to form 1040, the accountant, the IRS and Uncle Sam. Hearts and flowers, too!

The Boston weather also sucks. Love and kisses to the New England winter that keeps us indoors so we don't go spending that money the government is sending. Ooops! You spent yours online already? Sorry! Love and kisses to Uncle Sam.

The snow plow came at 4:00 a.m., waking the neighborhood and they could have saved the gas and the energy and sleep because the rains came and washed out all the snow and probably the inky-dinky spider as well. Love and kisses to the snowplow driver, the shovellers and the inky-dinky spider who long as he/she doesn't come into my basement. One of the cats might eat him which is gross beyond words. Love and kisses to the cats who never saw a crumb of food they didn't eat. Love and catnip and tummyrubs all round.

The Year of the Rat dinner was good. We saw "Babel" last night, also good. I cut some words from Promiscuous Mode. Very good.

Love and kisses and happy valentine's day to the writers who settled their strike. This writer was never on strike but felt feelings (felt feelings?) of brotherhood,sisterhood and comradeship to say nothing of solidarity. Experienced feelings! Yes!

Things do even out, most of the time. For some reason, writing never sucks, even when it does.
Write a valentine to someone/someething who is causing you grief. Send love and kisses,

Love and kisses,

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